Find Fellow UC Alumni Inside Any Company
Cold applications from UC grads land in the same pile as everyone else. The honest fix is finding the Tritons, Bruins, and Bears already inside and leading with what you share.
Find UC Alumni Now →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick your target company:
Why the shared UC campus is your best opening line
A recruiter reads a cold applicant as risk. A fellow UC grad reads you as one of theirs. The connection is not sentimental, it is a shortcut: they already trust the rough shape of your education and the people you learned from, so they spend their reply energy on helping instead of vetting.
UCSD alumni skew heavily into engineering, biotech, and quant roles, and UC grads cluster inside specific employers. That means at most target companies there is almost always a Triton or a Bruin two desks from the hiring manager. Your job is to find that person before you touch the apply button.
How to find the UC alumni already inside
Work the search like a list, not a hope. One pass per campus, because LinkedIn only matches the exact school string you give it.
- Filter company by school, one UC at a time. Open the company page, click People, and set the school filter to UC San Diego. Then rerun it for UCLA, Berkeley, Irvine, Davis, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Riverside, and Merced. Each is a separate list.
- Target one or two rungs up, not the CEO. A senior engineer or team lead in the group you want can forward your note internally. A VP will not read it, and a peer cannot refer you.
- Read for a real overlap you can name. Same major, same dorm era, a professor you both had, a club, or a lab. A specific shared detail turns a stranger into someone who owes you nothing but wants to help anyway.
- Skip anyone who left over a year ago. Alumni who no longer work there cannot refer you and rarely know the current openings. Confirm the role is current before you write.
Let FindWarmIntros do the finding and ranking
The search above works, but running eight campus filters per company and reading dozens of profiles is the part people quit on. FindWarmIntros is a free tool that does exactly this step: you name the target company, it finds the people there who share your school or a past employer, ranks them by how reachable and relevant they are, and drafts the intro note so you are editing instead of staring at a blank message.
It does not send anything for you and it does not fake a connection you do not have. It just collapses the hour of manual filtering into a list of real UC alumni worth writing to, so you spend your time on the message, not the lookup.
Write the ask so helping you costs 30 seconds
Lead with the shared campus in the first line, say the specific role you are eyeing, and end with a request small enough to answer on a phone. Do not attach your resume in the first message and do not ask them to get you the job.
A note like this works: 'Hi Priya, fellow UCSD Warren grad here (Cog Sci, 2021). I'm applying for the data analyst role on your team and wanted to reach out to someone who'd actually been there. Would you be open to me sending two quick questions?' It gives them an easy yes and signals you did your homework.